by Barbara Vine
The point beyond Paddington Station chosen for the release of underground steam was in Bayswater, among the new terraces of five-storey houses then being built. In order not to spoil the appearance of Leinster Gardens, façades were put up where numbers 23 and 24 should be, at a glance indistinguishable from their neighbours but easily spotted by the observant eye.
I was first taken to see these ‘houses’ by my father when I was nine; I have often wondered since then why they had never become a tourist attraction. From the opposite pavement in Leinster Gardens, sandwiched between two hotels, the Blakemore and the Henry VIII, they present an appearance of early decay. It is possible to see that they had never been lived in, could never be lived in, though front door and portico are present and their ranks of windows, the spaces where the glass should be painted a dull blue. On that first occasion my father took me through Craven Hill Gardens into Porchester Terrace, showed me the blank brick back of the façades and lifted me up on to the wall so that I could look down into the shaft. I asked my father about the people in the adjoining houses, they must have lived in perpetual fog, and I remember he told me that perhaps they got their houses at a reduced rent.
Mrs Darne was coming back from Tina's. She had a shopping list in her hand which she put into her handbag when she saw Alice. They had already spoken, so this time Mrs Darne only smiled and Alice managed a faint smile back. Her mother's words rang in her ears. She was making an ineffectual effort to keep herself from trembling. Mrs Darne, she guessed, would be too polite, too gentlewomanly, to let herself notice. As the old woman reached the front door there came distantly but tremendously, with a long reverberating thunderousness, the sound of an explosion.
Mrs Darne said, ‘Goodness, what was that?’
She had a voice and intonation exactly like those of the history mistress at Alice's school, an elderly lady, rumoured to be a baronet's sister.
Alice went outside with her. The sound was over and silence was back, or what passed for silence here. A train ran by. The front garden of Cambridge School was like a piece of meadow, long grass, willow herb, daisies and golden rod. A laburnum growing out of the midst of it was in flower.
‘I suppose that was a bomb.’
‘I suppose it was,’ said Alice.
‘There were houses all down this side of the street once,’ said Mrs Darne, ‘but they were bombed in the war. That was the night all our windows blew out. We had a Morrison shelter and we were under that, my husband and myself and his mother. Of course, that was long before Tina was born.’
‘Perhaps it was just a car backfiring,’ said Alice, ‘or even thunder.’
‘No, it was a bomb,’ said Mrs Darne in the tone of an expert.
Alice went back into the house and upstairs to the Headmaster's Study. She had borrowed a small tape recorder from Jarvis and was going to record her own playing, a critical exercise that she had postponed from day to day. She took her violin out of its case, feeling afraid.
Accommodation was plentiful at Cecilia Darne's house where all those years ago a bomb had blown the windows out. It was a fine large house, built in the last decade of the nineteenth century of red brick and red tiles.
By Tina's standards and those of her friends, it was enormous. When she was in her teens she had even felt ashamed, having to confess to people she knew that she and her mother lived all alone in it instead of letting bits of it off as flats. But when Cecilia was married in 1940 and first went to live there it was thought a poor sort of house, semi-detached, shabby and in a dowdy district. The Jarvis family had all come down in the world, considering the money their Victorian grandfather, a manufacturer of bathroom fittings, had made for them, Ernest with the dwindling Cambridge School, Evelina nutty as a squirrel's cage and with her first sojourn in a nursing home behind her, Cecilia married to a Customs officer.
The house was called Lilac Villa, a name no one used, though the front garden contained several ancient gnarled lilac bushes. High-ceilinged large rooms filled the three storeys. On the top floor the bedrooms had pretty sloping ceilings and dormer windows peering out under eyelid gables. The front windows stared into a row of typical West Hampstead studios, red brick, balconied and with Gothic windows from a design by Burne-Jones. Tina had lived up there with her children when Brian threw her out, but ate downstairs because Cecilia was a good cook and the television was in the drawing room.
Tina never felt guilty about anything, but Cecilia was guilty all the time. She blamed herself for the way Tina was, though she did not know what she had done wrong, and she blamed herself for not trying harder to keep Tina in her house when she wanted to go off to Jarvis Stringer's. Cecilia was willing to do anything to make up to Tina for the deprivations of her childhood, though what these deprivations were she hardly knew. They must have been there because people only grew up like Tina when they had had a hard time as children. Perhaps she had been too old for parenthood, and then it was very sad for a girl to lose her father in her teens. Perhaps she should have had a brother or sister for Tina, though being well into her forties by then and having waited twelve years for Tina to come along made that impossible.
When Cecilia looked back to Tina's childhood it was always that particular day when Ernest Jarvis had hanged himself that she remembered. Tina was seven, very pretty and sweet, with long blonde hair. Even then she had found it difficult to get up in the morning, had begged and pleaded to be allowed to lie in a little longer, had gone back to sleep more often than not, the forerunner, Cecilia supposed, of her present practice of often lying in bed till noon. It was while Cecilia was running upstairs for the third time to tell Tina she must get up, she really must or she would be late for school, that she heard the Cambridge School bell utter a single toll.
The strange thing was that she knew it was Ernest's bell, the bell she had tactfully told him would be unsuitable for the kind of school he had in mind. She stood on the stairs by the open window, waiting for the next stroke of the bell, waiting in fact for this sign of Ernest's madness. It would not be too extreme to ascribe insanity to a headmaster with no pupils ringing a long-silent bell in an empty school. Besides, Cecilia had the example of poor Evelina before her and the recollection of a family rumour that a brother of that manufacturing grandfather had died in a lunatic asylum.
No second stroke came. Fifteen minutes were to pass before the bell rang a second time, succeeded by that awful rattle. Cecilia had closed the window and gone on upstairs to find dear little Tina up and dressed and trying to brush out the tangles in her golden hair. She had been a very affectionate child, climbing on Cecilia's knee to hug her, sitting with her arm round her father and her head on his shoulder. Cecilia sometimes wondered if this was the precursor of all that sex she seemed so fond of later on. She, Cecilia, though a loving, kind and humble woman, touched no one if she could help it and thought this reserve might be connected with her never having been much for sex. Of course she had touched Tina and kissed and cuddled her – too much or too little?
Tina said a terrible thing to her when she was seventeen, two years after her father died. It was in the late sixties, an awful time in Cecilia's opinion. Morals began to lose their meaning and people said anything that came into their heads, the sort of thing that used to appear in books as a row of stars or be written down on slips of paper and handed to judges in court.
‘If you and Daphne had been young today,’ Tina said, ‘I suppose you'd have realized you were in love with each other and just lived together.’
Cecilia was speechless. She blushed deeply; Tina laid a hand on her arm and laughed merrily.
‘Oh, Tina,’ said Cecilia, ‘what a terrible thing to say to me, what a really terrible thing.’
‘No need to freak out,’ said Tina in the parlance of the time. She held her mother's hot fidgety hand and stroked it kindly. ‘If that's the way you are, that's the way you are. I don't suppose it's too late anyway. You look quite young for your age.’
Cecilia tried to gath
er together some dignity. She was near to tears. ‘Daphne is my closest friend, Tina. We've been best friends since our first day at school, when we were five. I am very fond of her and I respect her as she respects me.’
Tina only laughed and shook her head. But the next time Cecilia saw Daphne Bleech-Palmer Tina's words came back to her and she was for a while shy and constrained. If they had not been in the habit of seeing each other so often, at least once a week and sometimes more, talking on the phone every day, that appalling suggestion might have driven a bolt through their friendship, eventually destroying it. But Daphne's dear familiarity, the pleasure of her company, the comfort of knowing pretty well what she would say in response to any remark, the whole warm, easy, ancient closeness that had subsisted between them for more than half a century, won over Cecilia's temporary, though profound, embarrassment. It had been deepest at the moment just inside the Bleech-Palmer front door when, as always, Daphne set her plump hands on Cecilia's shoulders and lifted her lips to Cecilia's cheek. The blood had run into Cecilia's face and she felt that its hot presence under her skin must burn Daphne's mouth.
But Daphne only smiled and, as also was customary, asked after Tina. They were both widows, so there was no husband's welfare to inquire about. Cecilia forced herself to show an interest in Daphne's son and Daphne's garden and after a while things grew easier. Their frequent meet gradually heaped oblivion on Tina's remark and if Cecilia never entirely forgot it, it surfaced only when something was said that dug into that particular muddy accumulation. A piece, for instance, about homosexuals on the television, which was all too frequent, or some comment on the things Peter got up to.
One of them phoned the other every evening. Daphne, whom Cecilia suspected of being rather less well-off than she was herself, though this was not a matter to delve into, phoned her just after six on alternate evenings and she phoned Daphne on the others. The arrangement was to wait until after six because that was when the cheap rate started.
Cecilia always waited until after 6.30. She liked to watch the early evening news on BBC 1 and see it through to the end so that she could get the weather forecast. Daphne tended to phone her just after six, which meant missing fifteen or twenty minutes of the news, but Cecilia never said anything about this because she would far rather miss the news than hurt Daphne. She could always watch it at nine, though this was not the same. By nine she felt, knowing this to be illogical, that the news was stale and she had passed three foolish hours in ignorance of disaster or even, very occasionally, of something wonderful.
It was her turn to phone Daphne this evening. Cecilia sat in her comfortable drawing room on the sofa-bed that was always a sofa and never a bed – ‘But you've got five bedrooms, Ma,’ said Tina who had her eye on it – and turned on the television at twenty seconds to six. She had learned to time it so as not to hear the tail end of the terrible Neighbours music which, no matter how much you hated it, was a tune you could easily get on the brain.
The first item on the news was the bomb. It had been a bomb. It had gone off in a hotel in Leinster Place and would always in future be known as the ‘Bayswater Bomb’. Two people had been killed, a waitress and a hotel guest, and five injured. If it had been timed to go off an hour later, probably it had been timed to go off an hour later but something had gone wrong, the hotel dining room would have been full and the results of the explosion much worse. Cecilia thought this would not be much comfort to the relatives and friends of the waitress and the guest. The waitress was only nineteen.
There followed a catalogue of bomb outrages in London in recent and distant years. No terrorist group had yet claimed responsibility. Cecilia reflected on how massive the explosion must have been for her and that beautiful girl to have heard it up here in West Hampstead. For some reason, perhaps because they had heard it together, she equated that girl with the dead girl in her mind and thought that if bombers could actually see the people they were going to kill, see that they were young and beautiful and full of hope, they might not do what they did.
She said it to Daphne when she phoned her after the weather forecast.
‘That one doesn't work,’ said Daphne. ‘Look at the Nazis and the gas chambers.’ She did not seem much interested in the bomb. Peter was being silly again. He had brought a boy called Jay to meet her, in exactly the way Arthur had taken her to meet his mother all those years ago. Then he phoned, he had just this minute phoned, to ask her what she thought of Jay.
‘I told him he was being silly but he'd grow out of it.’
‘I'm sure you're right.’
‘He'll meet the right girl and then he'll feel differently.’
As Daphne said this there flashed into Cecilia's mind that conversation with Tina, that terrible thing Tina had said, and another thought, one that seemed to swim up out of the deep waters of her unconscious, the idea that she, Cecilia Darne, yes, she, had once long ago met the right girl, and here was that right girl talking to her now of something, oh, so akin to what Tina meant…
Panic was the feeling Alice had when, after several tries, she gave up attempting the Beethoven. She threw down the bow. She felt like throwing it across the room but managed to control herself. What was she going to do? Why hadn't she realized how hopeless she had become, how she had forgotten everything during those months of pregnancy?
She began pacing the room. Had that really been her playing? Not for a moment had she been able to deceive herself that she was anything but bad, truly bad. Buying that blank tape had been a waste, for she knew she would never dare play it back.
At the window she pressed her forehead against the cold glass. The panic receded as she forced herself to make practical plans. It was no good harking back to the days of coming top in exams, the days of her violin teacher's delight in her, his saying that really he wouldn't be surprised if she was good enough for Brussels or Prague. A year of continuous musical training at a conservatoire and she would be fit for a top orchestra or even the concert platform. He would not say that now, he would be embarrassed.
She must find a teacher. Before she was fit for any audition she needed lessons. And lessons must be paid for. A train rattling by made her lift her head and look out of the window. You could see the station platforms from here, and the station itself and the bridge. Tom and Peter and Peter's new friend Jay were standing on the platform waiting for the southbound Jubilee train. She had told Tom she would not go with them today but now she wished she had. Being alone was the worst thing; when she was alone she thought about things and nearly all of them were bad.
If Tom wanted her she would go to Tom, just to be with someone, to have someone to hold her in the night.
She waved to him but he was not looking in her direction. Perhaps you could not even see the windows of the School from where he was. The silver train, drawing into the station, first hid him from view, then took him away. She watched it rattle down to Finchley Road.
Jay was no mean performer (in Peter's words) on the tenor sax but he was nervous and edgy about doing something which he said was against the law. It made them all laugh when Peter said that come to that, what he did with him was against the law since Jay was not yet twenty-one.
‘Someone told me,’ said Tom, ‘that they never arrest you, they only move you on. They'd arrest you if you gave a false name or something like that or if you were just a beggar. I mean, you get people who blow a couple of bars on a mouth organ and then hold out their hands. We're real musicians.’
They were going to Oxford Circus for a change and had booked a patch. The Argyll Street entrance was full of real beggars, the kind that do not even have mouth organs. The beggars held out old caps, which made Tom resolve never to use a cap. A hat was all right or an instrument case or even a scarf with knotted corners. They set up at the foot of the first escalator. It was noisy and crowded, the concourses and passages full of tourists, hundreds of schoolchildren and students with backpacks.
Tom said he wouldn't play. Later on he wou
ld sing. The flute did not really go with a guitar and sax. Peter and Jay played the sort of music he disliked even more than he disliked rock, the kind of thing you associated with canned tunes in restaurants and supermarkets: ‘La Vie en Rose’ and ‘Never on Sunday’ and ‘Un Homme et une Femme’. It hardly surprised him that people were not too keen on paying good money for that.
He found himself wishing Alice were with them then, wishing it quite fiercely. He missed her. Her lovely face came before his eyes and he thought how beautifully she had played on the few occasions she had come down here with him. The two of them should be playing here now, giving these commuters some real music, something they would love. Alice had been sent to him, in the midst of all his unhappiness and frustration and failure, this beautiful talented musician had been sent to him to save him. She was not Diana, she was not Diana's successor, but the perfection he had looked for and half-seen in both of them. The idea of a woman who would save him was not new, but it had become real, it was no longer fantasy.
He was falling in love with her. No, it was past that. He thought he had loved her from the moment he set eyes on her. It was Diana's face but lovelier, as if Diana's looks had been enriched by life and sadness. A warmth, coupled with excitement, had filled him as she opened her violin case, took out the instrument and began to play. He loved the way her eyes lit when she heard the kind of music she liked well played.
Peter and Jay finished ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ and he told them which of his repertoire he would sing. That made Jay nervous again but Peter assured him they would manage, it was dead easy, a breeze. Tom sang a Burns song and then, because it went so well with the guitar, never mind the sax, Don Giovanni's pretty serenade. The coins started dropping into the guitar case.
